Three tigers totter up
to their bright and tiny pedestals,
waiting to be told

by a sequined man
it’s permissible to roar. One by one
he will try on a halo

of saliva and sparkling
teeth, and when the first mouth closes down,
it reeks of the raw

chuck steak
that keeps him fat and lazy. Almost
no one applauds

as he removes his head,
stepping forward to the next set of teeth
while waving

an immaculate glove.
For a moment it looks like he’s conducting
the canned music

as it spills
into the bleachers from the black trumpets
of the sound system.

But the audience cares
nothing for the hoop of fire
that never burns,

for the whip
that impacts only itself
in the popcorned

and sawdusty air
of the tent. They like the world
risky

for somebody else.
They came here to see the tame
untamed. Someone,

they seem to be saying,
had better get into that shit-filled cage
and the cage had better mean it.

That’s how desperate
they are. They need something
to turn away from.

In the March darkness of the almost
dawn, he is waiting for a train
and regretting the bottle and a half of wine
he drank in front of the television last night—
watching a cop show, of all things,
in which the criminals are always caught,
but not before murdering or raping
their way into the headlines
he has always been denied. Now
he is surrounded by birds in the clamor
of their spring. There are so many
it’s hard to imagine it means anything
or that they’re even listening. There’s one call
unfamiliar, mixed in like static
to the music of a bad radio—
a faint high treble he could have heard
in any March, if only he had listened,
if only he had risen before the sun
to regret his wine more often
as the world was just getting started. At last
the 6:23 comes barreling into the station
with its giant headlight, its painful horn,
its tormented brakes that somehow stop
the speeding metal he steps into. It cancels out
the birdsong and takes him to the place
that, soon enough, will make him
thirsty again, a place with a good excuse
he must strive to keep from hearing.